Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos, a New Yorker staff writer based in China from 2005 to 2013, follows people he came to know there during years of sweeping change. Drawing partly on his magazine reporting, he casts the central conflict as individual aspiration against the Communist Party's drive to keep control. His subjects range from the artist Ai Weiwei and the economist Justin Yifu Lin to an auctioneer jailed for bribing judges, a street sweeper and a teacher. Osnos asks why a state so successful at lifting people from poverty curbs free expression, and how Chinese people find meaning after the pursuit of wealth. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction.

The White House included it on a vacation reading list released for Barack Obama, and Patrick Collison lists it on his bookshelf. Gates Foundation chief executive Sue Desmond-Hellmann said it helped her understand today's China through the stories of both well-known and ordinary people.